Mick Hartley

William Jacobson, at Legal Insurrection, with more of that "progressive" anti-Israel campus fun. This time it's Vassar:

Once again, Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY, is mired in controversy regarding anti-Israel activities on campus involving Vassar faculty.

The controversy surrounds the February 3, 2016, appearance of Rutgers Associate Professor Jasbir Puar at the invitation of several Vassar departments, including Jewish Studies….

Puar is an Associate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, who specializes in Queer Theory. Puar is on the Advisory Board of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, a leading coordinator of Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) activities in academia. She was active in the American Studies Association resolution to boycott Israeli academia, and also has written extensively in support of the “anti-pinkwashing” movement which claims that Israel uses it’s LGBTQ-friendly policies to “pinkwash” crimes against Palestinians….

The event was titled Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters, and the event announcement gave this description:

This lecture theorizes oscillating relations between disciplinary, pre-emptive, and increasingly prehensive forms of power that shape human and non-human materialities in Palestine. Calculation, computing, informational technologies, surveillance, and militarization are all facets of prehensive control. Further, the saturation of spatial and temporal stratum in Palestine demonstrates the use of technologies of measure to manufacture a “remote control” occupation, one that produces a different version of Israeli “home invasions” through the maiming and stunting of population. If Gaza, for example, is indeed the world’s largest “open air prison” and an experimental lab for Israeli military apparatuses, infrastructural chaos, and metric manipulation, what kinds of fantasies (about power, about bodies, about resistance, about politics) are driving this project?

"The saturation of spatial and temporal stratum"?? (Shouldn't that be "strata"? I only ask.)

Though the audience was asked not to record the event, members of FTI (Fairness to Israel) attended, and prepared a transcript:

Substantively, Puar leveled a plethora of accusations against Israel, including speculation about organ harvesting and claims that the shooting of Palestinians involved in knife and other attacks are just field executions:

Since October of 2015, new uprisings in the West Bank have ignited what many are now calling the third intifada.  Protests, stabbings, flagrant refusals of IDF control, clashes and revived commitment to a peoples’ rumble have resulted in more than 120 deaths by field assassinations of young Palestinian men, largely between the ages of 12 to 16, by IDF soldiers.  On January 1^st, 2016, the Israeli government returns 17 bodies of these youth that purportedly lay in a morgue in West Jerusalem for two months.  No explanation has ever been given for their detention.  Some speculate that the bodies were mined for organs for scientific research.  17 ambulances, each with one body, stretched out along a convoluted route between East Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

There were so many accusations in Puar’s speech it’s hard to address them all, but on the core issue of Israel experimenting with “stunting” Palestinian bodies, here is the key passage:

Medical neutrality is a doctrine that says that medical personnel and medical infrastructure is off limits in terms of any kind of firing and has been in effect for quite some time, over 150 years.  And this violation of medical neutrality is something that Israel has not paid any attention to.  The assault on infrastructure, a central component of the biopolitical regulation of a malleable humanitarian collapse whereby the supporting infrastructure of ordinary life becomes both target and weapon.  The terrain is thus dependent on the withdrawn colonizer’s infrastructural support which modulates calories, megawatts, water, telecommunication networks, to provide the bare minimum for survival, but minimal enough to attempt to defeat or strip resistance.  Reflecting the turn from a regulatory to an asphyxiatory application of power, the target here is not just life itself but resistance itself.  Omar Jabary Salamanca quotes Israeli politician Dov Weissglass [sic], he states, quote, Israel’s policy would be like an appointment with a dietician.  The Palestinians will get a lot thinner but they won’t die….

Targeting youth, not for death but for stunting, which is an official medical diagnosis, for physical and psychological and cognitive injuries, is another aspect of its biopolitical tactic that seeks to render impotent any future resistance.  Future capacity to sustain Palestinian life on its own terms, thereby debilitating generational time.  This is the epigenetics, the weaponized epigenetics….

And yet stunting can be understood as another form of gendering or perhaps ungendering that may discharge or perhaps even preempt male-female binaries for a biopolitics that is not only driven through human reproduction but through the durational capitalist instrumentalizations of inhuman entities.  So gender is not tethered to human reproductive capacity, rather distributed across [inaudible] and temporalities of control.  Dismemberment of reproduction is a source of profit within this speculative rehabilitation economy where keeping labor alive but docile is not the only goal.  The Palestinian laborer is a tenuous and evacuating category, given the importation of foreign laborers since the Oslo Accords.

Dismantled and dismembered bodies accomplish more than dead ones….

Maiming functions as will not let die and will not make die.  Maiming masquerades as let live when in fact it acts as will not let die.  So for example, the IOS policy of shooting to maim, not to kill, is often misperceived as the preservation of life.  In this version of attenuated life, neither living nor dying is the aim….

It is not merely a byproduct of war, of war’s collateral damage.  It is used to achieve a tactical aims of settler colonialism.  So this functions on two levels: the maiming of humans within a context that is utterly and systematically resource-deprived, an infrastructural field that is unable to transform the cripple into the disabled.  This point is crucial for part of what gels the disabled body that is hailed by rights discourses is the availability of the process of domestication of that disability.  And second, the maiming of infrastructure in order to stunt or decay the abled body into debilitation through the control of calories, water, electricity, health care, supplies, fuel and also mobility….

Maiming and stunting then forces bodily change. It weaponizes bodily change.  The objects of gendering and genreing then are about biopolitical calculations, population metrics, reproductive capacities, biogenetics and eugenics….

Technologies of measure, algorithmic computing, architecture and infrastructure — prehensive gendering operates at the sub, para and intimate levels as body parts and the kinds of changes that come with epigenetic deterioration take hold.  In the context, then, of Palestine, hacking is not a computational metaphor, rather a distinct practice of reshaping the forms of human bodies and parts informed by computational platforms.

Thank you.  (thunderous applause)

Jesus Christ. The blood libel goes postmodern. 

Judith Butler, eat your heart out.